Top Draw Blog

Sharing expertise, tips of the trade, site launches and other news about all things web – and all things Top Draw. Visit often. We have lots to say.

We’re proud to announce the launch of the redeveloped Top Draw website. That means we’ve completely overhauled our site with new design, fresh content and add-ons developed to get you closer and more connected to our entire team.

Top Draw is returning to iMedia this year in force! Ameet, Idris, and Adriel will all be presenting at the conference, which takes place March 13-14 at the Robbins Health Learning Centre in MacEwan University.

We’re super proud of our PPC expert, Ameet, for setting up and hosting a successful Google Partner’s event at Top Draw headquarters yesterday morning! Almost 20 information hungry people came out to watch a webinar about all the cool things that Google can do to help them make their business a success. They learned about keywords, ad targeting, online competition and so much more.

Online marketing has a dirty little secret: most websites fail to best track THE most important stat: phone calls generated. As a result, plenty of CEO’s out there think that their websites do very little for them. At Top Draw, we’ve found that website-generated calls are usually responsible for 70-90% of all new lead phone calls for the clients we work with.

“YouTube on a Shoestring Budget” presented by Adriel Michaud at Social Media Breakfast Edmonton on January 30, 2015. The video recording from YouTube: PPT Presentation: Download YouTube on a Shoestring Budget Powerpoint.

I have been managing PPC (pay-per-click) accounts for some time now and sometimes I think that the 95 characters is more than enough to convey a message but the truth is, it’s not. We need more space and characters to get our target audience interested enough to click on our ad and then view what we’re selling to them. So, how do we get this extra space and characters we, as marketers, desperately need?

As a link builder, I’m constantly looking for sites I can utilize to get links for my clients. There are no shortage of directories, blogs and resource lists to target, but when it comes to domains with lots of authority, these are much harder to nail down.

One way I get around this is by signing up to be a freelance writer for big, popular sites. By doing this, I get to not only score a few links for my clients here and there, but I also get to increase my online authority by writing about the things I know and love!

More marketing professionals are placing a greater priority on general online marketing by throwing a blanket strategy over it, but is that enough? I dont think so. I’d argue that online video is greatly underpriced and undervalued at the moment.

So you own a website and you know you’re supposed to get other sites to link to it in order to get Google to trust you. Awesome! You’re already leaps and bounds ahead of most website owners. Depending on your game plan though, authority building can either be a very rewarding or a very frustrating experience. Having been a link builder for the majority of my SEO career, I’ve been at both ends of that spectrum.

There are things you’ll do that pretty much guarantee you aren’t going to get the link and there are also sure-fire things you must do in order to make sure you get the link.